New ways of educating are making the exam irrelevant

In the past few weeks hundreds of thousands of young people across Australia have had their futures determined by one of education's enduring rituals – the exam.

But even if they are now celebrating good results, how much does a high exam grade say about a student's real-life ability and their prospects of doing well in a job?

Not much, argues Ben Nelson, a Silicon Valley technology entrepreneur whose San Francisco-based university, Minerva Schools, is challenging America's Ivy League with a new way of education.

At the Australian National University students ask why they need to sit in a gymnasium and write with a pen. I'm as mystified as they are, says deputy vice chancellor Marnie Hughes-Warrington. Alex Ellinghausen

Minerva, which started teaching in 2014 with a roster of academic stars led by former Harvard dean Stephen Kosslyn, doesn't do exams. Nelson says they are not at all reflective of real-life or challenges that people meet in their job.

"When was the last time someone told you to turn off the internet, sit down for an hour and write down the answers to a series of questions while you are observed to make sure you aren't using any external reference?" he asks.

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The answer is obvious. It was when, and only when, you last sat an exam.

Real world tests

Instead, at Minerva, students are graded in two ways. One is whether they demonstrate in class that they have mastered the material. The other is on projects they do, both individually and in groups.

"This mirrors the way in which people get evaluated in the real world – by how they perform in meetings and gatherings as well as by the quality of their work product, both individually accomplished and in teams," Nelson says.

Minerva's solution seems radical, but it just takes to the logical endpoint a growing dissatisfaction with exams as a way to measure student accomplishment. Many Australian academics agree.

"You have a generation of young people who say 'I'm mystified about why we are doing this'," says Marnie Hughes-Warrington, deputy vice-chancellor (academic) at the Australian National University.

"Increasingly, young people are saying, 'Why are you asking me to write with a pen? And why are you asking me to sit in a gymnasium?' "

Hughes-Warrington understands their puzzlement. "I'm actually as mystified as they are." The exam is supposed "to gesture toward the workplace but it doesn't," she says.

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Skills conflict

At Deakin University, deputy vice-chancellor (education) Beverley Oliver agrees there are question marks around exams. "I probably couldn't write for two hours by hand," she says.

According to Jim Barber, former vice-chancellor of the University of New England, there's a glaring contradiction between the employment attributes universities want to develop in their students – such as co-operative work and team communication to solve problems – and the characteristics needed to do well in traditional exams.

"We punish in exams exactly what we reward in the workplace," he says.

Hughes-Warrington is also conscious of the conflict. This year ANU banned students from wearing watches in exams because the advent of smartwatches meant they could access outside information. But she knows that such restrictions make the exam environment even less like the real world, where such technologies are being rapidly adopted.

"An exam is supposed to test your proficiency. What's your proficiency for? Actually transacting in life. But in life we have access to smartphones and smartwatches," says Hughes-Warrington.

Universities are searching for an answer to this dilemma. There is serious thought going into how to make student assessment more like the challenges students are going to meet when they get a job.

Out-of-the-box solutions

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What are these work challenges that universities should be preparing students for? They include showing initiative, knowing how to identify the problem, digging out hard-to-find information, working effectively with other people, and finding a solution which is well-thought through and likely to succeed.

Hughes-Warrington says that some academics are writing exam questions that try to test these more complex skills.

But other more out-of-the-box solutions are being talked about.

"A radical thought is that you do your learning at university but you don't pass until you're in a workplace and you've tested these skills," Hughes-Warrington says.

The problem universities face is made worse by the internet. What is the point in testing students' factual knowledge when all the facts – and far, far more than one person will ever master – are available with a few taps or clicks?

But, even as the internet has sharpened this dilemma for universities, it also offers an answer. A new style of teaching is emerging called "blended learning" which goes beyond just acquiring knowledge. It emphasises using the knowledge, in situations similar to those you would face in a job, so that students internalise it.

Blended learning

Blended learning does not strictly require the internet to exist. But the internet has turbo charged it, making it possible to introduce blended learning efficiently on a mass scale.

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Here's how it works. Instead of attending lectures – where people often daydream or look at Facebook and are notoriously shy to ask questions if they don't understand – students learn the core material of the subject online. They use online materials similar to massive open online courses, or MOOCs, which are freely available to anybody. The courses teach in bite-size chunks, pausing every 10 minutes or so to give students an online test to ensure they have understood a topic before going on to the next one.

But that's only one part of blended learning. It is also known as "flipped classroom" learning because instead of giving lectures – whose role is taken over by online courses – universities flip their teaching staff into running small group seminars where students discuss what they've learnt, solve problems or do group projects. Students also flip what they do. The homework – that is, watching the online learning course – comes before they go to class, not afterwards.

Blended learning is being pushed to its most sophisticated level in the United States at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Eric Grimson, MIT's chancellor for academic advancement, told The Australian Financial Review Higher Education Summit recently that this way of learning was proving far better than traditional lectures.

MIT has compared the two. In a chemistry course students were offered the alternative of old-style learning in which they went to live lectures, or doing them online in blended learning-style, with a follow-up session to discuss the work and solve problems in small groups.

The result was astounding. The change was apparent early in the semester-long course when MIT gives what it calls a "fifth week flag" to students who need to lift their game. Grimson says that usually in a 500-strong class there are 50-70 students who are flagged in the fifth week of semester. "Taught in the online method that number dropped to three," he says.

A tick or cross

The reason is partly due to MIT's highly-sophisticated education software. It engages with students, asking them questions about the material which are far deeper than the multiple choice questions that students are usually asked in online learning programs. Students give written answers of 200 to 300 words and the computer gives them feedback.

It can read and understand the student's written answers, using machine-learning techniques. Grimson stresses the high capability of the software in understanding text. "It's not just looking for key words, it's actually looking for the argument," he says.

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The advantage of computer-marked tests is that the machine never tires and it gives a quick response. "You don't wait two weeks to get the thing back to understand 'what did I miss'," says Grimson. Students know immediately what they need to work on and can go back to the online material or ask questions in their class. The course instructors can also see where the stumbling blocks are for students and can zero in on problem areas.

The primary purpose of the tests is not to give the students a tick or cross saying pass or fail. It's to help them learn. Grimson says that at the end of the course 80 per cent of the online students were at A grade level compared with less than 20 per cent for the traditionally taught course. "It's a single sample but it's one that captures my attention," he says.

MIT has also checked how computer marking compares with human markers. The machine is currently not far off human performance and is expected to improve. The computer also has the advantage that it can be scaled up to work with large classes of students. It means that it's possible to give quality blended learning on a mass scale at an efficient cost.

MIT is rapidly expanding blended learning to all its classes. "We are now flipping the classroom in most of our major required courses," Grimson says.

At MIT students are still required to do an exam at the end of a blended learning course. But, given that students have to show at every stage in the course that they have mastered the material, and have also used their learning to solve real-life problems, many education specialists see no reason for the end of semester exam.

Learn from mistakes

"I think exams at the end of the year will be redundant when all learning goes into a blended format," says Stephanie Fahey, EY's education lead partner in education, and a former deputy vice-chancellor of Monash University.

But blended learning does need to be well designed. A key thing is that students must be able to learn from their mistakes as they go along. The assessment must give feedback, says David Bowser, education lead for consultancy group Nous.

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Provided it is done well Bowser believes the assessment-as-you-go in blended learning is more authentic than traditional exams. He also points out that it cuts out classic pre-exam cramming behaviour and helps ensure that what has been learnt stays learnt. Otherwise they just "regurgitate the content [in the exam] and have forgotten it the next week," he says.

Is there no place for exams? Some online education advocates say exams still have their place.

Oliver, from Deakin University which is an acknowledged leader in online education, says exams can be scaled back but it's not yet time to throw them out.

Michelle Deaker, managing director of venture capital firm OneVentures which targets education investments, says exams are useful, not because they are necessarily the best overall form of assessment, but because they test a particular skill which some employers want. "They do test students' ability to work under pressure. That's a skill in the real world," she says.

Online education entrepreneur Dror Ben-Naim also asserts that exams are important. Ben-Naim's company, Smart Sparrow, developed an online learning platform out of research he had done at the University of NSW. The platform is adaptive, meaning that it responds differently depending on the students' level of ability, and can give a finely-grained picture of a student's progress.

Authentic assessments

"It's true that courseware platforms can assess students competency at each step. But it's a bit like measuring athletes while they practice," says Ben-Naim. He believes we need the "high stakes" assessment which an exam represents. "Such events make you practice, prepare, and yes, learn better."

But he says they need to be well designed so people don't "cram and forget" and there should also be space for the "authentic" assessments which are more like the challenges found in doing a job.

For EY's Fahey, the only thing preventing abolishing exams now is a security issue – preventing students getting help when doing an online test – and she believes that technological solutions will be found for this.

Fahey says universities are under pressure to come up with forms of assessment that will show employers how well graduates will perform in the workplace. She points out that in Britain both EY and PwC place little store on academic results in their graduate hiring decisions. An online test, an interview, and problem-solving exercises come before academic results are looked at.

The challenge for universities is to find different ways to assess students that give employers more confidence. If they can't then they will be in a dangerous place. "In the long term universities are losing their gatekeeper role," says Fahey